Patrick Caulfield was often seen as a British proponent of Pop Art, but it was a mantle, in his opinion, that didn’t quite fit. Yes, his work emerged in the early 1960s; he used bright, poster colours and almost cartoon-like sequences; but there was always something deeper, more mysterious, in his creations.
This special collection - a tribute to Caulfield, who died in September last year - goes some way to demonstrate the range of emotions he portrayed: everything from tongue-in-cheek, ambiguous and eccentric through to dark, lonely and haunting, while using rather commonplace objects like jugs and lampshades.
“Caulfield was a hero of the everyday,” says Tate Liverpool’s head of exhibitions, Simon Groom. “He was capable of taking something ordinary and transforming it into something quite extraordinary.”
His flat, graphic style has two and three dimensions constantly jockeying for position. Wine Glasses (1969) is just a splash of maroon on top of blobs of green, but Caulfield’s trademark thick, black lines make the title image jump out. Likewise, a print of dark grey, with nine jagged shapes of glowing orange peeping through, is all that there is to Coal Fire (1969). Yet it is so wonderfully recognisable.
And when a plain yellow square is transformed into part of a room with a clock, and named Crying To The Walls: My God! My God! Will She Relent? (1973), you understand exactly what Groom is getting at.
Caulfield’s context is everything. No longer is a seemingly simplistic screenprint of a tablecloth and menu merely a cute, angular sketch of a dining table - add the title and Watch Me Eat, Without Appetite, a la Carte (1973) becomes sad, empty and faceless. That there are hardly ever any human forms in his work further contributes to the poignancy.
Exceptions include After Lunch (1975), where a photomural is the only vivid representation of life, the rest merging into a wide, blue space. A lone figure stands, eyes downcast. His role was chosen quite deliberately by Caulfield “because the person, being a waiter, was a sort of cipher for nobody.”
The most upbeat segment of the print is a small patch of azure in the bottom right corner. It depicts a downstairs doorway, a shaft of light. Its potential evokes at least some hope in an otherwise melancholy scene.
It is this paradox of bright colour and enigma, pathos, even, which makes Caulfield’s work so exciting.
But just when you think you’ve got him sussed, watching as the whimsical, vibrant jugs of Pottery (1969) almost topple out of the picture, you turn around and see Black and White Flower Piece (1963), an astonishing monochromatic print comprising a grid - created using masking tape for precision - with a vase of flowers in the centre.
If you can manage to tear yourself away from the roses, there is an optical illusion whereby, when looking at any one of the small, intersecting white squares, all the other ones appear grey. If you skim all the little squares quickly enough, the picture begins to twinkle.
It’s the kind of merry, visual dance which, no doubt, would have made Caulfield smile.
